Corporate Line: A mild-mannered businessman (Sandler) is wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced to an anger management program, where he discovers that his instructor (Nicholson) is a crazy psycho with his own serious anger management problem, and is probably the one man in the world most capable of making his new student blow his lid.
The Good: Is it possible that Jack Nicholson can still surprise us? The funny thing is that the comedian is out funnied by Nicholson. Sandler always seems to be forcing each joke and here it doesn’t change much, except you have Jack making each joke seem natural. When Jack roars with laughter then entire audience can’t help but be infected by the same degree of humor. The same cannot be said about Sandler, but I will say thankfully he has dropped the baby talk this time around.
There are some scenes that are just hilarious. You don’t get many laugh out loud funny scenes in movies today, thankfully Anger Management is chock full of them. Nicholson and Sandler visit some monks and the rest is history.
There are good supporting cast members like Marisa Tomei and John Turturro. Turturro practically steals each scene as a complete lunatic who is fighting his anger, but doesn’t seem to be winning the battle.
The Bad: Sandler can’t get away from his usual ploys. Cameos seem to be his biggest ploy to set up weak points in films. Although Woody Harrelson makes for quite an ugly and scary drag queen its not really funny. Neither Mayor Guiliani nor Derek Jeter can get us to yuk it up.
The worst part is the usual sappy ending. Sandler loves to go after the tear jerker. It doesn’t work, but it did cause the audience to laugh at how goofy it was. Even worse was how we already knew how it was going to end within the first ten minutes of the film, thanks to obvious plot points that weren’t hidden and of course thanks to commercials for the film we’ve all seen on television.
Frankly: Although the holes in the film are so big you could drive a truck through them we are saved absolute grief by funny bits and a scene stealing Jack Nicholson. The teaming of Nicholson and Sandler has fantastic chemistry. I’d pay to see these two together again.
+ charlie craine
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